2.01.2008

Remember high school debates? I sure do, and I'm still annoyed about one of them. I was debating the wonders of nuclear energy, and I was pro (if I knew then what the price of gas was gonna do, I would have been even more for it). Anyway, I had several rebuttals all ready to go, and one was on Chernobyl as that was fresh on everyone's recent minds. I had enough info to stun my opponent on how that type of reactor didn't even exist anywhere in the US, and how several safety features had been disabled by low level technicians that shouldn't even been touching these devices. I'm still annoyed that my opponent, not by any grand plan, just forgets to bring this up until he was on his last rebuttal, and I was done. I still “won” the debate, but it could have been a much more resounding victory.

Ok, enough about my very brief debating career, and on to the review of Rocket Science. Here, we have one seriously competitive teen, Hal Hefner (Reece Thompson) who wants to vindicate her loss at last year's finals. However, she chooses an unlikely ally in the class stutterer who also is quite shy. Along the way we meet inept speech therapists who suggest such techniques of whispering, foreign accents, and singing the words to a familiar tune. Needless to say, this is of quite limited success. Still, the one thing that this guy has is persistence.

Unfortunately, he portrays the role of a stutterer a little too well. There were plenty of times that it gets overplayed, and we as the audience just want to finish the phrase for him, and to let it be over. As in, we'd like the film to be over. Seriously. If you want a reminder of high school than check it out, but otherwise this film is quite second rate, and offers very little that hasn't been done before and better.